Learning from Martial Arts: paradigm, discipline, habitus and the body of knowledge
However, what such examples show us is that unlearning gender or ethnicity or class is never going to boil down to an individual, or even a primarily bodily matter. The forming, teaching, positioning, arranging and coordinating of bodies is an irreducibly social matter, and is accordingly very far removed from the agency or control of any one individual. But if we take a different perspective, it is possible to see that there are other embodied/cultural realms and registers wherein individuals may seek to unlearn this or that form of embodied knowledge, in ways that one can assess in terms of individual agency and one's own relationship with and control of one's own body. The examples of this that I would like to look at may at first glance seem less obviously 'political' (and hence, perhaps, less obviously 'important', on first glance) than studies approaching the venerable problematics of race, ethnicity and gender as formulated in some canonical texts of cultural studies. In other words, my examples of embodied learning and unlearning may seem trivial when assessed in terms of the 'political' discourse of cultural theory. However, as Gary Hall and Jacques Derrida have each in different ways argued: on the one hand, even if we are more or less 'politicized' in our perspectives, we should not therefore be forced to prioritise 'political' questions or answers in our work; however, on the other hand and at the same time, we should not presume that politics and the political exist and operate only in the places and in the ways traditionally recognised as political (Hall 2002; Derrida 1992; Bowman 2007). Thus, even though my next discussion is not telegraphically or initially political, and is instead organised by (non-political but cultural) matters of bodily learning and unlearning, we should not presume that such matters have no bearing on the political field. As we will see, even matters as putatively trivial as learning and unlearning martial arts styles may actually come to offer a kind of 'royal road' to perceiving the (political) relations between bodies and institutions.
One is not Born, one Becomes a Martial Artist
One approach to the history of martial arts might be to approach it as a history of institutional and stylistic change. There is a temptation to think of this in terms of 'progress' or 'development' – or their flipside, regression and decline. However, all such terms imply objective standards of improvement or decline on a clear, fixed and stable line of progression; and this simply cannot be regarded as tenable. Whether an early 21st Century MMA fighter or krav maga practitioner is 'superior' or 'inferior' to a 19th or 20th Century prize fighter or jiujutsu expert, or a 17th Century samurai is a matter that cannot be answered in any meaningful way. This is because they do not exist in the same way, let alone at the same time, and accordingly they should not be evaluated according to the same criteria. In a strong sense, even though today we apply the term 'martial arts' as a blanket term to all, well, 'martial arts', across all times and places, we should be aware that contemporary usage and contemporary meanings and conceptualisations are contemporary, and the past should not merely be assessed according to the terms of the present.
Moreover, as Peter Lorge points out: 'As with the histories of many physical practices before the age of video recording, it is functionally impossible to compare an earlier with a contemporary practice' (Lorge 2012: loc 255). But it is not just because of an absence of motion capture technology that comparisons are not really possible. When dealing with the vast distances of time and place separating different 'martial arts' from each other, any fields of practice that we might want to isolate and demarcate from other practices and call 'martial arts' will differ in form, content, function, orientation and so on, depending on contextual factors. Each martial art amounts to an expression of one or more variable elements of variable dimensions of a society at a given time (whether aristocratic or underclass pastime, military exercise, paramilitary effort, gendered convention, class-based taste or necessity, sport, performance, ritual, or any number of variants or combinations of such elements). So, despite our contemporary tendency to do so, it seems illegitimate to approach the history of martial arts in terms of stylistic change. To focus on the notion of stylistic change in a historical study is to project backwards in time a contemporary understanding of and relation to martial arts. It is also an approach that is based on the tacit (essentialist) proposition that there is one stable, fixed and essentially always-recognisable 'thing' called 'martial arts'.
Whilst it is not impossible to construct a workable definition of 'martial arts' that enables historical exploration and discussion without falling into the traps of projecting contemporary assumptions everywhere (Lorge 2012), my concerns here do not lie in establishing historical truth. My concerns relate rather to martial arts as sites and scenes of enculturation in terms of what they can teach us about learning and unlearning, and to explore the implications of this.
As Peter Lorge puts it, the term martial arts should always be reserved to refer to practices designed and developed to increase efficiency and proficiency in acts of violence. Someone who is naturally good at dispensing violence is not a martial artist. But someone who trains and practices and works away at the question of the physical aspects of violence could be said to be one, or to be becoming one.
To be, or how to be
In the contemporary (postmodern) world, the aspiring martial arts student is faced with a vast number of potential choices when it comes to the available ways to become a martial artist. Those ways are styles. Like so many other dimensions of life in consumer cultures, one is often confronted with a superabundance of choice. What style should I choose? This is the first question. The second question is: well, which style is best?
In asking these two questions, the individual becomes immediately and inexorably linked into the dominant terms of martial arts discourse. This is because the question 'which style is best' is the one that has organised and structured popular cultural martial arts discourse since the explosion of martial arts as a popular cultural discourse in the early 1970s. The first versions of this question linked up with the most well known options on the Western table (or in Western sports centres) in the 1970s: which is best, judo or karate? For those who approached the question informed more by films and television programmes than by what was on offer at the local sports centre, however, the ultimate question was presented as, 'which is best, karate or kung fu?' Lurking in the shadows here is the ethnonationalistic question: which is best, Chinese or Japanese? But this is only immanent. The aspiring or actual martial artist is concerned primarily with pragmatic matters of effectiveness.
Nevertheless, race won't go away. In fact, it would be wrong to think that race raised its head later on, or that racial or ethnonationalist perspectives were added to martial arts discourse – or were added by Westerners. For, although it may be reasonable to propose that it was indeed within Western texts and contexts that 'martial arts' came to signify 'something Oriental' or 'something East Asian' (Teo 2008; Farrer and Whalen-Bridge 2011: 2), it is equally important to note that at the very entrance of the martial arts onto the global stage via Hong Kong and then Japanese films took place in terms organised by the question of which ethnonationalistic 'style' of martial arts is best (Bowman 2013a). The overlapping questions of which style, race, region, nation or place is best were arguably there from the beginning of the cinematically mediated life of martial arts.
Admittedly, the martial arts film that 'broke' the American market and kicked off the Western martial arts craze of the 1970s, King Boxer/Five Fingers of Death, was not organised by questions of racial/nationalistic superiority, but it was by the question of stylistic superiority. However, the Hong Kong films that exploded onto the international scene after this – such as Bruce Lee's first three Hong Kong martial arts films, in particular – were organised by questions of stylistic-qua-ethnonationalist superiority. In these films, the superiority of Chinese styles and hence China and the Chinese over Japanese, Thai, Russian, Korean, Italian and American fighters and fighting styles organises the action. But the film that most clearly exemplifies the obsession of martial arts discourse with discovering or producing 'the ultimate style' is the 1974 Japanese martial arts film The Street Fighter. This film sees the main character, played by Sonny Chiba, practicing a martial art that is a hybrid of Japanese and Chinese styles, one whose training also involves forms of modern weight training.
Further discussion of all of this would prove stimulating. But the key point is: the entrance of 'Asian' martial arts into global consciousness was an entrance carried out in terms of the question 'which style is best'. Thus, practicing a martial art was henceforth 'always' a matter of decision and choice, rather than local tradition. In other words, we might say that there is a change at the genetic level between premodern, modern and postmodern martial arts epochs, and their practices. In the early 1970s, martial arts emerged within (and added to) a more and more clearly postmodern scene. As Bill Brown notes: 'The kung fu craze thus seems explicable within the cultural logic of urban history as explained by David Harvey, intensifying his sense of 1973 as the pivotal year in the transition to what he calls postmodernity' (Brown 1997: 37).
The historical period and the cultural contexts of postmodernity are characterized by choice and diversity of styles. The postmodern era of martial arts was no exception. This is why the recent (post-1972) history of martial arts has been dominated by matters of style, stylistic choice, stylistic change and innovation, all carried out under the sign of the quest to 'find' or 'invent' the ultimate martial art.
All of this can be seen, in lots of realms. For instance, footage even shows Bruce Lee being asked about the differences between Chinese and Japanese martial arts during his first US TV screen test, for his role in The Green Hornet. He discusses approaches to combat in his role in the US TV series Longstreet. His second Hong Kong martial arts film, Fist of Fury, was organised by the theme of a deep-rooted feud between Chinese and Japanese martial arts schools in colonial Shanghai. His third Hong Kong film – Way of the Dragon (which was retitled and rereleased posthumously in the US as Return of the Dragon in the wake of the success of the first US venture into martial arts films proper, Enter the Dragon) – featured Lee both holding forth upon and then demonstrating the superiority and inferiority of certain nationalistically inflected martial arts.
Of course, as is well known, at the time of his death Lee was filming Game of Death, a film he had written and was directing, and which was apparently to be all about how limiting and stultifying styles are on individuals in all their untapped propensities. Instead of styles, Game of Death was to advocate the transcending of national, regional and any other types of formal style in combat. As opposed to style, Bruce Lee had come to advocate, in his words, 'honestly expressing yourself'. Lee had also laid out his argument about rejecting styles and rejecting institutionalisation of any kind in an article published in a leading US martial arts magazine in 1971. This article was called 'Liberate Yourself From Classical Karate' (Lee 1971) and was, as they say, 'ahead of the curve' in terms of the transformations that were going to rock martial arts discourses during the next couple of decades. In this article, Lee argues that formal martial arts styles cannot capture or convey or master what he calls the truth or reality of combat; therefore cleaving to one or another style is really little better than irrational superstition.
There are many reasons why Bruce Lee came to reject the notion of style, and the interpretation of this opens out onto considerations of all sorts of cultural and historical processes and dynamics. These have been discussed elsewhere (Bowman 2010). But in this context, I would like to conceptualise this rejection – which Bruce Lee spearheaded – as a desire for unlearning.
I propose to do so because in the postmodern martial arts subject narrative, after the questions 'which style should I choose?' and 'which style is best?', comes a period of training and accomplishment – a moving up through institutionalised belt or sash colours – until a certain date with destiny arises. This is, as they say, the moment of truth: the encounter of the martial artist with real violence. In the face of such encounters, a certain statement in one or another form is all too familiar. It is this: I studied martial arts for years, but one day I got into a fight, and it didn't work.
This statement is more than familiar in the martial arts world. In fact, it is the spectre, haunting the martial arts. It has precipitated countless existential crises, and countless renunciations of martial arts training; but it has also precipitated countless rethinks and moments of reinvention. The Chinese martial arts are littered with legends of contemplative monks and nuns inventing or reinventing fighting styles by watching animals fighting. The contemporary world has many of its own versions of this narrative, too; except that these are nowadays typically stories of defeat followed by introspection – like Robert the Bruce watching the spider in the cave, but without the spider.
The most famous creation or re-creation narrative in Western martial arts is – once again – the story of Bruce Lee's invention of jeet kune do. It goes like this. Bruce Lee had a fight, a fight that he did in the end win, but afterwards he was devastated that it had taken him so long to win, that he had not won by a decisive strike or knockout blow, and that he had been completely exhausted afterwards. As the legend goes, this prompted Lee to try to rethink everything he could about martial arts training. In the end, this culminated in his disavowal of 'traditional' martial arts and the development of a new attitude towards martial combat training. However, despite his affection for the term Jeet Kune Do (according to Taky Kimura and Dan Inosanto, Lee liked it mainly because he thought the acronym JKD sounded cool), Lee was adamant that he had not created yet another martial art or style. Styles 'separate and divide', he would say; and to reject one style and replace it with another would, in his thinking, be to completely miss the point that he was trying to drive home. His point, then, was this: that styles produce robots, drones, slaves; docile bodies, limited in their capacities; stunted and stultified in their propensities by being crammed full of what he called 'the classical mess' and 'organised despair'. By 'classical mess' he referred to katas, forms, drills, pre-set routines, automatic sequences, repositories of techniques and artificial or contrived responses to stimuli or simulated attacks. He regarded all of this as a 'fancy mess' of 'organised despair'. This was his primary target in his 1971 article, 'Liberate Yourself From Classical Karate' (Lee 1971).
Revolution in Pugilistic Language
Bruce Lee's rejection-reinvention of martial arts offers the clearest example of a paradigm shift in Western martial arts discourse. Before Bruce Lee – indeed, to some extent, because of Bruce Lee – martial arts discourse in the West had been about style versus style. But after Bruce Lee – after the later Bruce Lee, the Bruce Lee that emerged through knowledge of his writings and the lessons he gave to his students, rather than the Bruce Lee 'known' only through the films – it came to be the case that the best style to have was no style; the best institution to be in was no institution. Anarchic, individualistic, anti-institutional: Bruce Lee urged a revolution in martial arts discourse and practice, one in which individuals would explore and experiment and find out for themselves through processes of innovation and verification.
I have argued before that whilst Bruce Lee believed he had freed himself from what, after Foucault, we might now call discipline, it is still possible to regard his 'liberated' non-style as bearing the traces and hallmarks of some clear and present ingredients: the centreline theory of wing chun kung fu, the stances of western fencing, the movement style of Mohammad Ali and the body mechanics used by boxers with the strongest jab or straight right lead (Bowman 2010, 2013a; Foucault 1977; Tom 2005).
The problem in Lee's thinking can be seen when we consider that his own discourse was based on a conceptual opposition between style or unnaturalness, on the one hand, and non-style or naturalness, on the other. Naturalness is deemed superior. But this opposition does not allow for the fact that to learn how to punch or kick or throw with any kind of effective force necessarily requires training. One simply cannot execute something like a side thrust kick, or a hook or uppercut, or any arm-lock, throw, sweep or take down, without some formal training. And to undertake any kind of training is to do so in a particular way, and that way means a style.
However, Lee was no simplistic thinker. Elsewhere, he wrote an aphorism to this effect: before I began martial arts, a kick was just a kick, a punch just a punch. When I began martial arts, I discovered that there were so many types of kick, and so many types of punch, which were all very different from each other. But when I had mastered martial arts, a kick was just a kick, a punch just a punch. Thus the paradox: with bodily mastery comes bodily naturalness. So where does this leave us vis-à-vis the Bruce Lee who sought to reject or escape from the confines of the wing chun training that he came to believe had hindered not helped him in at least one fight – the fight that caused him to turn his back on kung fu styles as such and to urge readers of martial arts magazines to 'liberate' themselves from 'classical karate'?
It is extremely interesting that Bruce Lee's discourse wittingly or unwittingly aligns itself with various sociological and anthropological perspectives, in which even the most 'natural' bodily dispositions, propensities and affects are regarded as culturally constituted (Mauss 1992; Csordas 1994; Foucault 1977; Bourdieu 1979). Thus the question becomes one of what it means for bodily knowledge to be rejected or replaced. Both perspectives – Bruce Lee's, on the one hand, and the Maussian-Csordasian-Bourdieuian-Foucauldian, on the other – implicitly or explicitly align the constitution of subjective propensities with some kind of institutional intervention. The body is never just a body. It is constituted in its propensities by institutional supplements – interventions from the outside that forge the body.
Bourdieuian theory, for instance, proposes that we are constituted by a habitus – everything that structures our likely/unconscious/more or less automatic or reflex responses in given situations. Certain readers of Bourdieu have proposed a distinction between primary and secondary levels of habitus (Hilgers 2009). Primary habitus will be deeply engrained, deeply learned (from childhood). Secondary habitus will be the result of lifestyle choices or later life transitions or changes – as, for example, when the hitherto sedentary adult takes up a martial art.
Inevitably – as with all Bourdieuian theory an sociological theory in general – the distinction between primary and secondary habitus is both a metaphor and a metaphor for situations that are always doing to be indeterminate and undecidable. A clear line between primary and secondary habitus can perhaps only ever exist in the pages of a text of sociology. But if we apply these terms to a slightly less all-encompassing and slightly more concrete example, the question of primary and secondary habitus might prove helpful.
For instance, we might say that Bruce Lee – and many subsequent martial artists (whether inspired directly by Bruce Lee or not) – sought to escape from or liberate themselves from the constraints of the strictures of a kind of primary habitus of martial arts training. The primary habitus of a martial artist in the West at that time most likely took the form of hours upon hours spent performing katas and patters and set sparring routines and so on. Such drills are formalisations of the mechanics of a given martial arts style. They contain all of the logics of movement and response, all of the techniques and applications of the particular style. However, as the sports writer Davis Miller noted in his autobiography, the limitations of this sort of primary habitus could quickly became painfully apparent to martial artists trained in this way. Miller describes a school fight he had when he was a young martial artist. As the martial artist he was the favourite in the fight. But, unfortunately, he didn't land a single blow. In fact, he threw punches and kicks into the air. None of them would have hit his opponent even if his opponent had stood still. This was because, despite all his years of training, he had never actually hit a real person, in training or otherwise. Consequently, when the time came to do so, he had actually trained away the ability to hit someone. He could throw the techniques, but he could not make them connect with another human body (Miller 2000). His untrained opponent, however, fuelled by anger and intent to hurt, had internalised no such inhibitions, and beat Miller to a pulp.
Similarly, Andy Norman, the co-founder of a self-defence style called Keysi Fighting Method, explains that what led him to reject traditional martial arts training and to move into a different direction was that when, one evening, he found himself facing multiple opponents in a street fight, none of the formal martial arts techniques he tried to do would work. He says he tried everything he had been trained to do, but nothing worked. Consequently he reverted to the pure brutality of head-butting, gouging, stamping, spitting and screaming to redeem the situation.
The combat expert Rory Miller explains that the problem with formal martial arts training is that it often teaches evermore highly technical and refined techniques, but that it does so without adding the dimension of a background or foreground of pure terror or otherwise heightened emotion. This is a problem because of the effects of what Miller calls the 'chemical dump' – namely, the explosion of stress-release chemicals within the body in times of crisis. The chemical overload within a body in fight or flight situations has two effects, he points out: first, the effect of 'freeze' – the rabbit in the headlights inability to act. The second is the retardation of fine and gross motor skills. Unless one is ultra calm and collected in a combat situation, one will not be able to execute complex or subtle moves properly. And one will not be calm. Hence the paradox: the trained martial artist will often perform considerably worse in a fight than even the completely untrained person. This is because the martial artist will still try to execute the techniques that they have been taught, but the requisite motor skills, the proprioception, the calm collectedness, and everything else required, will be unavailable to them. The untrained combatant, however, will be more likely to use all of their strength and bodyweight to the best of their ability, rather than technique. Moreover, martial artists might even find themselves unable to throw brute force at the problem. It might not even occur to them. They may no longer know how (Miller 2008).
This is why martial artists can come to wish to liberate themselves from their primary martial arts habitus or enculturation. As this blog entry is already overly long, I will defer further discussion of the implications of this for matters of embodiment, habitus, discipline and so on.
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